Today we finally got around to recording the commentary for our last film, Little Women. It's been over six months since we premiered it last fall, and the DVD is looooong overdue. I think it will prove worth the wait though. The commentary (from director, cinematographer and...director #2?) is peppered with humor, fun facts about filming, and even some useful tips for beginning moviemakers. My two co-producers (all three of us have half a dozen differant titles) felt that they could have recorded twice as much as we did, but I felt that we covered the important things without becoming repetative. The film itself is about 55 minutes, which is a good length for our audience. We have something substantial and therefore can show that we're capable of difficult things- and yet it's not so long that our "fans" can't find time in their busy lives to watch it.
We had a bit of a scare in the beginning. Well, two actually. First of all we weren't sure whether we actually had a burned copy of the final cut. That resulted in a bit of a scramble as both my brother and I dug through our extensive CD collections to find a workable copy. Thankfully our commentary recorder already had it on his computer so we were safe.
Secondly the tornado siren went off in our area and we could actually see some cloud formations that looked rather dangerous. It was very windy. But, that too was nothing worse than a heavy rain and we were able to proceed as planned.
The cool thing about this time (we've done two other commentaries for our previous films) was that we were able to watch the film on a huge screen! Our recordist has a projecter that projected the film onto a large stretch of blank wall. The quality wasn't the best, but it was a pretty cool way to do the recording!
And then after that we watched the last 15 minutes or so of LWW on the same projector...so cool to see it on the big screen! (It was the extended version too, which I had not seen before). So over all a pretty cool day.
4 comments:
I recently learned that the second part of Little Woman in my copy is actually Good Wives, a separate book. *mind spins* How confusing! So, does your movie end with the ending of Little Woman, not Good Wives?
Very observant! Yes, we chose to end our movie at the end of "Little Women" which is when Mr. March comes home and Mr. Brook proposes to Meg. It gave us a good, 3 act structure with a proper climax (Beth's illness) that could be satisfactorily shown in a 1 hour span. That was a decision that I made very early on in the process. Because what we consider "Little Woman" is, as you said, written in two parts, it was quite easy to determine where the cut off point would be.
BTW- how did you figure out where our ending was?
Oy, I just realized that I wrote "Little WomAn" twice. *facepalm* Believe me, I DO know what the title of the book is.
I must admit that I'm not very observant or brilliant. lol. You said a long time ago (perhaps in the "Film Projects" thread on FTF) that your movie ended with Mr. Brook's proposal, and at first I thought indignantly, "How could you DO that?" But then I learned about the two separate books thing, and it all started to become clearer; but I've only read LW once, so I wasn't sure of Mr. Brook's proposal was at the end of Little Women or not. I just asked to make sure, because my Perfectionist Side always wants to be 100% positive. (This Perfectionist Side caused me quite a lot of trouble today, with an essay about a Minnesota Indian massacre... *sigh* )
Anyhow, I believe you said (also in the Film Projects topic) that you're going to be selling the DVD of Little Women? When will that be happening? :)
Very soon, actually! One of our producers is graduating in a week and a half, and we want to have the DVD available to sell at his open house. Today, in fact, I'm going through the movie and naming the DVD chapters.
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